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Category Archives: Reading

Last month I wrote an article for The Atlantic on the state of the digital divide, the surprisingly high rate of device (smartphone and tablet) adoption at all socio-economic strata, and what these new statistics mean for ebooks and reading. An excerpt:

According to Common Sense, 51 percent of teenagers in low-income families have their own smartphones, and 48 percent of tweens in those families have their own tablets. Note that these are their own devices, not devices they have to borrow from someone else. Among middle-income families (that is, between $35,000 and $100,000), 53 percent of tweens have their own tablets and 69 percent of teenagers have their own smartphones, certainly higher but by a lot less than one might imagine.

In this comprehensive survey, a striking 85 percent of families living below the poverty line have some kind of digital device, smartphone or tablet, in their household. Seventy-three percent had one or more smartphones, compared to 84 percent for families above the poverty line. These are vastly changed numbers from just a few years ago. A 2011 study by Common Sense showed that in lower-income (under $30,000) households with children, only 27 percent of them had a smartphone, compared to 57 percent for households with children and income over $75,000.

It’s worth pondering the significance of these new numbers, and how we might be able to leverage widespread device adoption to increase reading. My conclusion:

We must do everything we can to connect kids with books. Print books, ebooks, library books, bookstores—let’s have it all. Let’s give children access to books whenever and wherever, whether it’s a paperback in the backpack, or a phone in the back pocket.

Indeed, the relationship between reading and distraction was one of the things that caught my eye reading Daniel Kahneman‘s essential Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman speaks of two systems in the mind—he eschews “intuition” and “reason” for the more neutral “System 1” and “System 2″—with the first making quick, unconscious assessments and the second engaging in much more studious, and laborious, calculations. Since our minds (like our bodies) are naturally lazy, we prefer to stick with System 1’s judgments as much as possible, unless jarred out of it into the grumpier System 2.

In the fifth chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman addresses the act of reading, and the impulse—even in what is normally thought of as the most cerebral of human acts—to fall back on System 1, to associate the ease of reading with the truth of what is read:

How do you know that a statement is true? If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease. The trouble is that there may be other causes for your feeling of ease—including the quality of the font and the appealing rhythm of the prose—and you have no simple way of tracing your feelings to their source.

Thus the context writing exists in and other aspects unrelated to the actual content are critical to the reception that writing receives. In addition to studies on the effects of different fonts on credibility, Kahneman also cites experiments that show the importance of the quality of paper (for printed materials), of the contrast between a font and its background, and of the presence of distractions that reduce the cognitive ease of reading. In short, environments that make it easy to read also make it easy to believe what is being read. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this mixture of context and content is that is it extremely difficult for you to separate the two.

So legibility and the absence of distractions are not just design niceties; when a reader chooses to move an article into an app like Instapaper, they are strongly increasing the odds that they will like what they read and agree with it. And since readers often make that relocation at the recommendation of a trusted source, the written work is additionally “framed” as worthy even before the act of reading has begun.

Commercial publishers may not like the use of Instapaper or Readability, which strip the distractions otherwise known as ads from a cluttered website to focus solely on the text at hand, but they are an unalloyed good for writers.

I have no doubt that book reading is declining. My offense at the report has to do with the second-class status of the digital realm throughout. Sunil Iyengar, the Director of Research & Analysis for the NEA states on p. 23 of the report:

Unless “book-reading” is speciﬁcally mentioned, study results on voluntary reading should be taken as referencing all varieties of leisure reading (e.g., magazines, newspapers, online reading), and not books alone. [my emphasis]

But the rest of the report makes it almost impossible to see how “online reading” was actually included as “voluntary reading” and lauded as such. While there are indeed charts about “book reading,” most charts are at best ambiguous about what “reading” means and at worst seem to make the online world devoid of words. For example, Table 3E, on p. 40, lists the “Weekly Average Hours and/or Minutes Spent on Various Activities by American Children, 2002-3.” But bizarrely “computer activities” (2:45) are distinct from “reading” (1:17), as if no reading occurred during those online hours.

More generally—and this is what I think many of us in the digital humanities are reacting to—the report is suffused with the nostalgic view of armchair leisure book reading (a nostalgia I share, by the way, and indeed deeply yearn for as an overstretched father of young children with a very busy day job). The report thus belittles the work of all of us trying to move serious reading and scholarship where it will surely go in the coming decades—online. As a historian, it reminds me of the early modern disparagements of writing and reading in the vernacular, back when only Latin would do for “serious” study and scholarship.

The double standard for digital reading versus paper reading can be seen in a letter to the Chronicle of Higher Ed by Mark Bauerlein. Bauerlein’s retort to Matt Kirschenbaum is to look at “what eye-tracking technology reveals about how users scan Web pages.” I assume his point is that these studies reveal the ADHD that we “votaries of online and screen reading” have, skimming and grazing rather than “really” reading. But can you imagine what would be revealed in eye tracking studies of readers of newspapers and magazines? Ad agencies have long known—indeed, it is the first principle of graphic design in advertising—that most pages are glanced at for mere seconds or even a fraction of a second, not “read.” (The report, sensing this potential criticism and keeping to its theme, emphasizes on p. 51 that teenagers are more likely to “skim” the “news sections.”)

But what of books? I’m sure I’m not the only academic who would like to strap eye trackers onto the heads of the book prize committees for professional academic organizations, who are supposed to read dozens or hundreds of books in short order—but surely skim (or worse). Matt Kirschenbaum and many others are simply making what, upon reflection, is a rather commonsensical point: that “reading” has always included multiple styles, including deep linear styles and more flighty ones. As Roy Rosenzweig and I point out in our book Digital History, we academics should be finding ways to encourage long-form reading on the screen (where all reading will ultimately head anyway) rather than, in our bookish nostalgia, ceding the medium to web usability specialists who encourage blurb writing for short attention spans.

Ultimately, To Read or Not To Read seems strangely dated in 2008. On its pages it remains obsessed with TV just at the point when kids’ leisure time pursuits are moving swiftly online. In an age when an “academic blog” is no longer an oxymoron, the report inexplicably mentions “blogs”—the source of so much online reading and writing and now even part of so many classrooms—on a single page out of 98, and only to dismiss them as pseudo-reading and writing in a worn critique that resorts to quoting from Sven Birkerts’ early-Web Gutenberg Elegies (1994). The report also oddly dismisses the exponential rise in online newspaper readership while lamenting the 2 or 3 percent yearly decline in paper “subscribers.”

After reading the civics portion of the report (pp. 86-92), which particularly emphasizes the importance of book reading (see pp. 88-89), a question came to mind: might email, IM, texting, social networking and other online pursuits enhance “civic engagement” and understanding more than reading a good thick policy treatise? The smartphone-bearing, Facebook-using teenagers currently working (often virtually) on the presidential primaries in the United States have little time for leisure reading, and a good number of them are probably not “voluntary readers” of the Platonic sort envisioned in To Read or Not To Read. But they are learning—and doing, and reading—much more in the digital realm than this myopic report can conceive.